Motorola Snaps Up 280 North For $20 Million

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Motorola has acquired Y Combinator startup 280 North, we’ve confirmed. We haven’t confirmed, but have heard from multiple sources, that the price is around $20 million. This is a sizable exit for the founders – the company has raised just $250,000 in a 2008 angel round.

280 North created a programming language and set of frameworks collectively known as Cappuccino that can be used to create rich web applications in the same way you’d create desktop applications for MacOS X. Developers we’ve spoken with have praised the framework, calling it one of the best ways to make applications with little programming knowledge.

Apparently Motorola agrees. In an email, a spokesperson says “I can confirm that Motorola acquired 280 North earlier this summer. The transaction provides Motorola with specialized web-app engineering talent and technology that will help facilitate the continued expansion of Motorola’s application ecosystem. We believe 280 North will be instrumental in helping us continue to foster the Android ecosystem with innovative web-based technologies and applications. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.”

Rack up another win for Lowercase Capital, XGYC and the other angel investors. They didn’t invest much, but this is an amazing return on equity.